Diana Wynne Jones’s Fantastical Journeys Collection. Diana Wynne Jones

      “A very good sailor,” Aunt Beck prompted. “No weather affects me, ever.”

      “Very good sailor,” Ivar repeated. “No weather affects me, ever.”

      “Good.” Aunt Beck snapped her fingers in front of Ivar’s eyes, then sat back on her heels and stared at him closely. Ivar blinked and shifted and gazed around the small, dim cabin. “How are you now?” Aunt Beck asked, handing him a clean shirt.

      Ivar looked at her as if he were not all that sure for a moment. Then he seemed to come to life. “Ow!” he said. “By the Guardians, I’m hungry!”

      “Of course you are,” Aunt Beck agreed. “You’d better run along and get breakfast before Ogo eats all the oatcakes.”

      “Gods of Chaldea!” Ivar leapt up. “I’ll kill him if he has!” Clutching his shirt to his front, he pounded away to the eating room. Aunt Beck climbed to her feet and pushed her ruby pin back into her hair, looking satisfied. Quite smug really.

      I was going to follow Ivar, in case he did attack Ogo. You can never trust Ogo to defend himself properly. But Aunt Beck stopped me. “Not now,” she said. “We’ve work to do. I want to know what Mevenne packed in our bags.”

      I sighed a little and followed her across the gangway. The bags were piled at one end of our cabin. Aunt Beck knelt down and unbuckled the top one. A strong smell came out. It was not exactly a bad smell, rather like camomile and honey-gone-bad, only not quite. It made me feel a little seasick. Aunt Beck bit off a curse and clapped the bag shut again.

      “Up on deck with these,” she said to me. “You take those two, Aileen.”

      I did as she said, but not easily. Those bags were good quality hide, and heavy. I thought Aunt Beck was going to throw them into the sea. But she stopped in the shelter of the rowing boat, where it was roped to the deck, and dumped the bags down there.

      “Put yours here,” she said to me, kneeling down to open one, “and then we shall see. What have we here?” She pulled out a grand-looking linen gown and unfolded it carefully. There were brown twiggy bits of herb in every fold. “Hm,” she said, surveying and sniffing. Her face went very stiff. For a moment, she simply knelt there. Then she put her head up cheerfully and said to me, “Well, well. Mevenne was no doubt trying to keep moths away and has got it wrong as usual. Take each garment as I hand it to you and shake it out over the side. With the wind, mind. Make sure none of these unfortunate plants touch the ship or yourself either if you can avoid it.” And she bundled the gown into my arms.

      It took me half an hour to shake all the herbs away. Aunt Beck passed me garment after fine garment, each still folded, each stuffed with herbs like a goose ready for roasting. Some of the woollen ones took no end of shaking because the twiggy bits stuck into the fabric and clung there. About halfway through, I remember asking, “Won’t this poison the sea, Aunt Beck?”

      “No, not in the least,” Aunt Beck replied, lifting out underclothes. “There is nothing like salt water to cancel bad magics.”

      “Even if it was unintentional?” I asked.

      Aunt Beck smiled a grim little smile. “As to that,” she said and then said nothing more, but just passed me a bundle of underclothing.

      By the end, we had a heap of loose clothing and four empty bags. Aunt Beck knelt on the heap, picking up shirts and sleeves, sniffing and shaking her head. “Still smells,” she said. “These are such fine cloth that it goes against the grain with me to throw them in the sea too. Kneel on them, Aileen, or they’ll blow away, and I’ll see what I can do.”

      She went briskly away and came back shortly with a coil of clothesline and a basket of pegs. Goodness knows where she had got them from. Then we both became very busy slinging up the line around the deck and pegging out flapping garments all over the ship. Ivar and Ogo came up on deck to stare. The sailors became very irritable, ducking under clothing as they went about their work and sniffing the bad camomile scent angrily.

      Eventually, the Captain came and accosted Aunt Beck, under a billowing plaid. “What are you doing here, woman? This is a fine time to have a washday!”

      “I’m only doing what needs doing, Seamus Hamish,” Aunt Beck retorted, pegging up a wildly kicking pair of drawers. “This clothing is contaminated.”

      “It surely is,” said the Captain. “Smells like the devil’s socks. Are you raising this wind to blow the smell away?”

      Aunt Beck finished pegging the drawers and faced the Captain with her red heels planted well apart and her arms folded. “Seamus Hamish, I have never raised wind in all my born days. What would be the need on Skarr? What is the need here?”

      Seamus Hamish folded his arms too. It was impressive because his arms were massive and covered with pictures. “Then it is the smell doing it.”

      Whatever was doing it, there was no doubt that the wind was getting up. When I looked out from under the flapping clothing, I could see yellow-brown waves chopping up and down and spume flying from the tops of them. Aunt Beck actually had long black pieces of hair blowing from her neatly plaited head. “Nonsense!” she said, and turned away.

      “I tell you it is!” boomed the Captain. “And turning the sky purple. Look, woman!” He pointed with a vast arm and, sure enough, the bits of sky I could see were a strange, hazy lilac colour.

      Aunt Beck said, “Nonsense, man. The barrier is doing it.” She picked up one of the bags and began punching and pounding it to turn it inside out.

      “I have never seen the sky this colour,” Seamus Hamish declared. “And you must take at least this plaid down. My steersman can’t see his road for it.”

      “Aileen,” said Aunt Beck, “take the plaid and peg it somewhere else.”

      I did as I was bid. The only other place I could find was a rope on the front of the ship. I got Ogo to help me because the wind was now so fierce that I couldn’t hold the plaid on my own. We left it flying out from the prow like a strange flag and went back to find Aunt Beck had turned all the bags inside out and was strapping them to the rowing boat to air. The ship’s cook was looming over her.

      “And if you didn’t take my basin, who did?” he was saying.

      Ogo and I exchanged guilty looks. Ogo had fetched the basin for Ivar and I had dropped it into the sea.

      Aunt Beck shrugged. “None of my doing, man. The Prince of Kinross was unwell in the night. The bowl is now unfit to cook with.”

      The cook turned and glared at Ivar, who was leaning against one of the masts with his hair blowing, looking very fit and rosy. He stared back at the cook in a most princely way. “My apologies,” he said loftily.

      “Then I must mix my dough some other way, I suppose,” the cook said grumpily. And he went away muttering, “Always bad luck to sail with a witch. The curse of Lone on you all!”

      Aunt Beck didn’t seem to hear, which was lucky. Nothing enrages her more than being called a witch. She simply got up and went below to tidy her hair.

      “What is the curse of Lone?” Ogo asked me anxiously as we stood among the flapping garments. They were flapping more and more as the wind rose. The ship was pitching and waves were hissing against the deck.

      I had never heard of the curse, but Ivar said, “Obvious. It means that you disappear like the Land of Lone did.”

      The words were hardly out of his mouth when there was a grinding and a jolting from underneath, followed by a crunching from somewhere up at the front. The ship tilted sideways and seemed to stop moving. Above the noise of several huge waves washing across the deck, I could hear Seamus Hamish screaming curses at the steersman and the steersman bawling back.

      “You slithering, blind ass’s rear end! Look what you did!”

      “How is a man to steer with that